


Little Clown Frozen -- a Story in Two Screams

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Study, Despair, Gamzee embraces the end of the world, Gamzee is trapped in a fridge, Nihilism, Other, The Vast Honk, another pause seemed as good a time as any to vent, another pause?, honk honk, just... warning. he's in a bad place, plenty of frozen corpses, wandering narration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-04-12 16:51:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4487289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s one thing to lose your mind.   That’s a gibbering, stardust-gagged necessity for plenty of Subjugglators.   How else could they paint their dripping rainbows?<br/>They were just people, after all.<br/>Gamzee had always thought, Gamzee had always said – all trolls were just people, and blood was blood whether frozen or steaming, sour pink or sweeter than cherry syrup.  People were people, and people could –<br/>Ha.<br/>Honk.</p><p> </p><p>Gamzee Makara is in a fridge surrounded by the slow-rotting corpses of his "friends."  Occasionally, the fridge honks.  This is an analysis of how Gamzee got bent crooked as a doll kicked under the bed, folded in among the sliced-up dead.  Here are two reasons why he might be honking away in the dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little Clown Frozen -- a Story in Two Screams

**Author's Note:**

> :o)
> 
> more Gamzee headcanons and analysis, as it doesn't seem he's getting out of the fridge any time soon.

Prelude:

Here We Are, Here We Are

Here We

Go

 

                It’s one thing to lose your mind.   That’s a gibbering, stardust-gagged necessity for plenty of Subjugglators.  How else could clowns slather the walls in organs and slipped-off skins?  How else could they paint their dripping rainbows?

                They were just people, after all.

                Gamzee had always thought, Gamzee had always said – all trolls were just people, and blood was blood whether frozen or steaming, sour pink or sweeter than cherry syrup.  People were people, and people could –

                Ha.

                _Honk_.

That’s the rotten joke at the core of things, O brothers, O sisters– that’s what’s kept secret at the heart of the sickest, darkest glitter-bleeding carnival.  It’s _one_ thing to lose your mind, and it’s what plenty of people would think you _need_. 

It was what Equius had thought Gamzee needed, at any rate.  Gamzee had always known that he should rage.  Could rage?  Should. 

He had been told the rage bubbled deep in him, like carbonated blood that would fizz and boil and drown if he were shaken too hard.  And he had been shaken –

Oh, he had been shaken –

He had been shaken to laughing and sobs, to slathering a corpse in sloppy wet kisses, to painting his first

Dripping

Gory

Rainbows. 

But Gamzee had not lost his mind.  Oh, brothers and sisters mine, he had not lost anything but his own puppet strings.  It’s one thing to swallow yourself, or let the cold, wicked blood _swallow you whole_.  It’s another thing entirely to feel yourself fade into staring cotton-candy blue plastic puppet eyes.  It’s another thing to be dangled and spun on spindly spider-web strings, made to smile and sway as your insides squelch out and paint bitter grape clouds and oceans of you on the ground.    

Gamzee had been rotted by slime.  Gamzee asked the cool kid with the punchline red blood if he should listen to the puppet-voice whispering, gnawing at him, rapping at the crooked wormwood doors to his mind like it wanted nothing more than to get inside.  He asked, and Dave had said yes, go for it, absolutely.

And Gamzee had let the puppet in. 

That was the start of it.  That was the first line of blood drawn from the neck of things, one slick, clean knife stroke that no one but Gamzee seemed to remember. 

Then he laughed his throat to gory ribbons.  Then he lost his voice.

Then he got a new voice

THAT SCREAMED

and crooned

AND HOWLED

judgement

AND GAMZEE LAUGHED.

And he watched himself pound little green kitty cat skin and brain and crunched-up sweet bone marrow into tiles in a laboratory.  Something too much like his never-there, never-real, never-never lusus stared empty-eyed and floating lazy in a formaldehyde jar.  Watching him.

Are you proud now, you old goat?  Are you proud now, Dad?

Equius was so proud he died smiling.

Then he met the little spider-girl with her gauzy skirts like mist at midnight, and she spun him like a limp clown doll.

Gamzee made gods.  The puppet made gods, as Gamzee bled and smiled and bled and smiled and

Gamzee met his ancestor, his descendent, his shadow self, this horrible someone built of the same spindly-skeleton body and carbonated blood as Gamzee.  No one had been afraid of Kurloz’s mirthful church.  Kurloz didn’t want a tender, impossible messiah, whatever sort of clown priest Beforus’s Gamzee must have been to make paint-splattered peace and circus acts that didn’t end in everyone laughing over a corpse.  Kurloz believed in one messiah, one Angel of Double-Death, and Gamzee hated the ways he could see Kurloz smiling back from his own reflection. 

And despite being the puppet’s puppet, despite being the spider-queen’s little rag doll –

Gamzee could never know when Kurloz made his eyes burn purple, when Kurloz did his wicked holy work through Gamzee’s own thorn-clawed fingers. 

Gamzee wouldn’t have been able to remember.

But oh, to the people he loved, to the people he hated, to the people he hated to love –

He didn’t lose his mind.  He lost his world, his timeline, instead.

Sometimes what had happened here and happened there, in the other-real, got tangled in Gamzee’s head.  His puppet strings danced on, though, so many strings tugging so many places, and

And now he was here.

Where was he?

Folded into himself like a doll between couch cushions, crushed under the bed and forgotten because it had its stuffing ripped out, because it stared too hard too long too

Hungrily. 

Gamzee was cold.  He was folded up.  It was dark enough to see clearly, too clearly, as his old friends’...  If he they had ever been his friends, if he had ever known a friend outside this puppet gibbering in his head and the twin souls wearing a self-same skull he had raised into gods... His friends’/not friends’ corpses rotted tenderly against his skin. 

Gamzee would have thought someone would have asked for him to go free.  Tavros, maybe – Tav-bro, Tavros with the stories and the raps and the wimpy shaking smiles that Gamzee used to imagine right before he fell asleep.  Karkat, KK, Karkat who in another life had patted Gamzee’s rage down so he could breathe as himself again and claw his way to the top of his own bubbling mind.  Gamzee had thought _someone_ would have pried the fridge open and let him breathe something outside the heavy sweet stink of the dead.

Sometimes the fridge honked, after all.

Everyone knew he was here.  It was warm enough to rot slowly and cold enough to ache all through.

Even people that hadn’t watched him raging, who hadn’t seen him shaken apart, they knew where he was and who he was and what puppet he had worn slung over his shoulders.

Everyone knew, and no one cared. 

The fridge honked out screams, as what Gamzee was and had been and might have become froze into something stranger.

There were two kinds of screams that might have been, and one Gamzee that could have been either screamer, both screamers, neither and all.

One little clown with his eyes crusting over in the cold.  It could have been he starved to death and never died.  It could have been he bit off slivers of corpse-meat and left only his friends’-not friends’ heads to knock against him when the fridge moved, like bubbles in a can of wicked elixir.  It could have everything

It could have been –

 

First Scream:

It’s Better Every Time You Say It

 

It could have been that Gamzee lay curled in the rot-sticky cold and stirred up thoughts about the end of the world – “honk” was, to the clown church, a most grievous “amen” after all.  With every rattling “honk,” Gamzee breathed damnation on those outside the chilled-bone tomb.  With every rattling “honk,” Gamzee screamed hate and hurt and the unflinching joy that someday all would be consumed by that same bloody word. 

The mirthful angel couldn’t save him, here, no matter how painfully Gamzee would have bled for her. 

No matter that his church on Beforus might have been to her unfailing glory, no matter that her era of laughing peace had been Gamzee’s pull to faith before the game.

Who had Gamzee been before the game, anyway?

A smiling boy with nonsense dribbling down his chin and sopor staining his eyes bleary green.  Eating the stuff from his own cocoon, getting high off his own metamorphosis – Gamzee was a staring empty head who had thought the smiling angel would keep all her promises. 

The Angel of Double-Death, in the end, had only one promise.  An eternal end, an eternal “honk.”

It was a relief to know _that word_ would drown out all these other voices, the voices of traitorous, blasphemous motherfuckers that knew Gamzee was trapped and kept him there.  It was a relief to know _that word_ would drown out all the voices in Gamzee’s own pierced-through head.

Ha.

Hahahaha.

Maybe Gamzee prayed to the Angel of Double-Death, there in his fridge, and maybe the Angel of Double-Death could hear him. 

 

Second Scream:

Gagging on the End of the World

 

It could have been Gamzee lay curled in the rot-sticky cold, gagged as Terezi had bound him once-upon-a-time, when his raging shadow-quick plan had been ruined by John Egbert.  Sloppy-sweet human boy, sharp-toothed giggling girl, and Gamzee dragged with his mouth sealed, with his voice smothered so everything he tried to scream became the word “honk.” 

“Help me!” – Honk.

“It’s in my head, gods, _it’s eating my head_!” – Honk.

“What are you doing?” – Honk.

“Have you forgotten me?” – Honk.

“And to think I used to love you!” Honk honk honk honk.

It was kind of hilarious, wasn’t it?  Just like Gamzee’s church had been to all his friends but Tavros – even good old Sollux here, with his salty yellow blood seeping into Gamzee’s hair.  Even he had laughed, once, but the joke was deadly serious and everything would die.  Gamzee had been told plenty of times that his faith sounded silly, sounded ridiculous… But now that it was true?  _The vast honk was true._

_What would those motherfuckers say now?_

The joke was funnier than Gamzee had thought it _could_ be, and now so was his voice.

Whether he willed it or not, then, all Gamzee’s words twisted themselves into prayers, into gory amens.  Everything he said warped into the end of the world. 

Maybe that was important.  Maybe that was the way things were meant to be.  As the voice of gods and angels and monsters, as the one who raised them into being on their ruined old moon, Gamzee would speak the end of the world no matter what. 

Maybe that was why he kept screaming, even when the words didn’t come out right.

Maybe that’s why he kept screaming until he forgot he had his own words

At all.

Maybe.  


End file.
